5:04am. Morning twilight. Looking down the southeastern slopes of Mt. Elbert at a valleywide cloud inversion.
5:05am. Now looking north at Mt. Massive.
5:17am. The colors begin to break.
5:30am. Across the Arkansas River Valley the Mosquito Range stands in silhouette against the sunrise.
5:35am. Descending to South Elbert trailhead, thinking about the hot shower waiting for me at a friend's house in Leadville.
5:49am. First eyes on the sun.
There's an ounce of tequila left in the bottle, but I promise I'm not going to drink it. My head still hurts from last night. My psychologist says there's only so much she can do for me unless I commit to getting sober, and I suppose hopping on the wagon and taking someone's advice for once is probably a pretty healthy way to have a midlife crisis. So instead of starting the evening with a shot of Jose Cuervo reposado and then following it with way too much of whatever catches my eye at Roxy's till I black out, I shall abstain and see if I can manage to coexist with the crippling emptiness and all the ageless memories of everything horrific for a single night without trying to kill myself. If I'm lucky I'll figure out how to do the same thing tomorrow night, too.
I've been reading more books than usual these days, partly because it's a great distraction from drinking, and partly because the room I'm renting right now is close to a thrift store with an excellent selection of literature. I recently finished Sarah Hepola's wonderful memoir Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. It's remarkable and also a bit disturbing how well I can identify with her experiences. Blackouts became the norm for me beginning about six years ago, shortly after my father passed away and I showed up on Hive looking for a place to hide in plain sight.
The alcohol abuse was my way of burying the depression and silencing the suicidal ideation, but of course it only made my situation much worse as time went on. Relationships fragmented one after another, my mental health faltered all the more, and my creative output swung wildly from rambling insanity on the one side to dumb nothingness on the other. One morning I woke up in my apartment in Leadville to find dried blood on my bedsheets and a little puddle of it over in the corner, and when I went to the bathroom to piss I saw in the mirror that my jaw was laid wide open to the bone. The last thing I could remember from the previous night was prying the cap off my second bomber of Bourbon County Stout. Everything after that was and still is a blank, including the part where I apparently edited a set of photos and wrote up a whole post on the blockchain to go with them. I patched up my face with a butterfly bandage and told my coworkers that I'd slipped and fallen in the shower. A few months later I went on a bender so horrendous it landed me in the emergency room. I'll spare you the details on that one because, well, your guess is as good as mine.
Another step I've taken in the right direction lately is plugging myself into the local trail running community. It's been years since I've had any real sort of social network to speak of, but I've started attending group runs now instead of exclusively flying solo in the mountains. Granted, the post-run meetups at Tres Litros could pose a problem at some point, but there are non-alcoholic options to be had there. It's worth noting that another function alcohol has served is replacing the community I lost when I rejected Christianity and left the church 15 years ago. I was a lone black sheep who went out to face the wolves with no support. For lack of a foundation formerly provided by a book of Levant mythology that I now use to start my campfires, I built a new foundation of my own using empty bottles. And what a shaky, dangerous foundation it was.
There are some other moves I will be making in the near future. I need to get myself into a doctor's office to take stock of the damage I've done to my body over the past decade and a half. I need to figure out what kind of medication I should be taking to get this thing in my head to just shut the fuck up. I need to focus on maintaining a more regular writing schedule, because writing is therapeutic for me, whether I end up publishing my work or not. And I also need to find a hobby. One of my mountain climbing mentors—who, at 53 years old, can still easily beat me to the top—told me that he took up unicycling when he turned 40, and it was just what he needed to ease his way into middle age. My therapist has also said I'm at the point in life where I'm really going to need some sort of purpose. I'm inclined to agree. I think I'll either get a membership at the local rock climbing gym or take up martial arts. Hell, maybe I'll do both.
Hepola writes in Blackout of the amygdala, the part of the brain that plays a big role in helping us make decisions, create long-term memories, and process trauma. As it turns out, alcohol is basically a circuit breaker that kills power to the amygdala. Hence the blackouts, the bad judgement calls, the pain that's impossible to drink away. This is the reason my therapist can only do so much. She needs access to something that I keep shutting down. If I can't find a way to watch the sun rise sober every morning, then her hands are tied—and my hands are tied as well.
